When Soviets Launched Sputnik, C.I.A. Was Not Surprised

The Soviet Union propelled the Sputnik satellite into space in 1957, making it the first man-made object to orbit the earth. In this image, released around the time of the launch, the satellite is shown resting on a three-legged pedestal.Credit...Russian News Agency, via Associated Press

The documents — which include information about Soviet missile capabilities and several Sputnik satellites — suggest that in the years leading up to the first Sputnik’s success, United States intelligence agents and government officials were growing more and more certain that a launch was imminent.

“U.S. intelligence, the military and the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower not only were fully informed of Soviet planning to launch an earth satellite but also knew a Soviet satellite would probably achieve orbit no later than the end of 1957,” the C.I.A. said in a report released on Wednesday.

The declassified documents do not say that the agency knew Sputnik’s precise launch date, and the report takes pains to explain that C.I.A. warnings about the launch were “strategic” rather than “tactical.”

When Sputnik launched, the Cold War was about a decade old. So was the C.I.A. Both the Soviets and the Americans had been working on satellite technology for years. But President Eisenhower, concerned about the Soviet Union’s work on intercontinental ballistic missiles, was reluctant to invest military resources in a space race.

The Soviets, on the other hand, had a much better grasp of the power of propaganda, said Michael Khodarkovsky, a history professor at Loyola University Chicago who specializes in Russia and the 20th century. He described “complete euphoria” in the Soviet Union after Sputnik launched.

“As a propaganda tool, it was just extraordinary,” he said in an interview on Thursday.

Sputnik was an aluminum sphere about the size of a beach ball — it was jammed full of communications equipment and weighed more than 180 pounds — with four spindly legs. It careered through space for three months, circling the Earth about every 100 minutes and emitting a regular pattern of beeps.

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The front page of The New York Times on Oct. 5, 1957.

When Tass, the official Russian news agency, first broke the news about Sputnik — it was a Friday night in Washington — the Soviet Embassy in Washington was hosting a reception for rocket and satellite specialists.

“I wish to make an announcement,” he said. “I am informed by The New York Times that a satellite is in orbit at an elevation of 900 kilometers. I wish to congratulate our Soviet colleagues on their achievement.”

The Soviet scientists in the room were beaming.

The launch surprised and worried many Americans, including politicians who criticized President Eisenhower for failing to take the space race seriously.

“Eisenhower’s reaction to the Sputnik’s launch contrasted sharply with the reaction of the American public,” the C.I.A. said in the report that was released on Wednesday. “He remained calm, and his much-quoted claim on 9 October that Sputnik ‘does not raise my apprehensions, not one iota’ — although borne out by the record — was met with skepticism.”

That calm was a result of the president’s being well forewarned, the C.I.A. report continued, detailing a number of agency correspondences and memos that suggested a launch was expected by the fall of 1957. (It even cited one C.I.A. officer, Eloise Page, who narrowed it down to a span of two weeks.)

“In the lead-up to Sputnik’s launch, C.I.A.’s support to its most important customer — the president — provided accurate strategic warning,” the report said. “The president was not surprised.”

Dr. Khodarkovsky, whose Op-Ed about Sputnik appeared in The Times the day before the C.I.A. declassified its 59 documents, said he was surprised by the agency’s new revelations.

“It shows then how incredibly naïve the American administration was, not realizing the value of the whole thing,” he said of the Soviets’ propaganda victory. “And that’s worth emphasizing because I find the same naïveté, to say the least, now.”

He said the United States invested more in education and space exploration back then and gained the upper hand in space exploration — something he said the country could do today in fields like cybersecurity.

The launch of Sputnik in 1957 kicked off the Cold War space race as we know it, and the United States did recover from the Soviets’ early lead. An American satellite was launched from Cape Canaveral in 1958, and American astronauts landed on the moon in 1969.